Recognise a burst as a different condition
An average number of conversations per day hides the fact that several people may arrive together. A campaign, outage or confusing page can create a short peak that a quiet-day schedule never tested. Watch the age of unanswered conversations and the responders’ active workload. Do not wait for complaints to discover overload. Decide in advance which person can reduce the channel’s scope or activate a fallback message when capacity is exceeded.
Keep the queue understandable
LiveChat documents queue behaviour when concurrent-chat limits are reached and a manual pickup option. Verify the configuration in your plan and test it with fictional visitors. The customer-facing message should explain that a person has not yet taken ownership, rather than implying an immediate answer. Avoid inventing a precise wait time without a reliable basis. Offer a way to leave the question asynchronously if the customer cannot wait.
Do not solve a queue by lowering answer quality
Increasing each responder’s simultaneous chats may shorten the visible queue while lengthening gaps within every conversation. Inspect accuracy, repeated questions and abandoned exchanges as well as first response. Prioritise cases using a documented service rule, not assumptions about a visitor’s spending power. If a question requires investigation, move it to an owned follow-up instead of letting it occupy an active conversation indefinitely. Preserve the customer’s last promise during that move.
Find the cause after the burst
Review the topics behind the peak. A repeated question may indicate missing product information, a broken instruction or an incident that deserves a public update. Fixing that cause can be more useful than purchasing extra software capacity. Record what the team changed and whether unresolved work was cleared. Do not describe a single successful peak as proof of unlimited scale; keep the tested staffing and scope boundaries attached to the result.
Sources used for this page
These records support the facts and comparisons above. Merchant-controlled records are labelled so you can separate product claims from independent evidence.
- LiveChat queue configuration — Merchant documentation · livechat.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-19
- LiveChat assignment documentation — Merchant documentation · livechat.com · Merchant-controlled · checked 2026-09-19